Rolling cars are more helpful than rolling heads
by ammcj062
Summary: Post-season four break, AUish. "Jesse sees Michael first, feet twisted in the wreck of Barrett's car and one hand clutching his bloody shoulder."  What happens once the credits rolled.


Jesse sees Michael first, feet twisted in the wreck of Barrett's car and one hand clutching his bloody shoulder. The sight leaves him… ambivalent. Jesse hates Michael, hates him for getting Jesse burned and for lying and for bringing him into this fold of amazing, loyal, lying bastards. But he doesn't like seeing a former ally unconscious (he's never seen Mike unconscious, never) and there's something frightening in Fiona's whine of distress.

"Michael…" She grazes one of those slight hands over his face while Sam lumbers next to her, presses down on Mike's gunshot wound hard. Mike cries out, raw and pained and strangled. His eyelids flutter and his eyes roll up but he doesn't wake, so Jesse knows none of that is faked or planned. It's the true Westen, probably the first Jesse's ever seen of him unguarded.

"Come on, Mikey," Sam mutters as his hands turn red with blood.

Jesse glances in the car, sees Barrett's open-dead eyes looking back, and turns back to Michael. Fiona's calling 9-1-1 as Sam tries to press the wound harder, as if by sticking his own hands in he can replace the blood Michael needs. The pain, however, rouses Michael. "Nate," he wheezes, and both allies pause.

This is just another thing Westen's kept hidden from him – whoever this Nate is.

"Stop. Nate –"

"Mikey, it's Sam. Sam Axe."

Michael blinks, slow and forced and obviously painful. It's a wonder he's still conscious.

"You got shot, brother."

Michael doesn't seem to understand. "Dad –?"

Fiona's fists tighten on her cell and she puts her hand back on Michael's face. Jesse consciously bites his tongue once. For all Madeline and Michael implied the father was a bastard, this is the first evidence of abuse Jesse's seen – the first evidence Michael's revealed. Because that question is asking who did it, not who he's talking to.

"It was Barrett, Mikey. You were trading the bible."

Michael jerks once, and all of a sudden Michael Westen, spy extraordinaire, has clawed his way back to the fore. "Bible – gone. Took…"

Sirens are wailing in the distance – police first, probably, in response to the shootout. Fi's looking around frantically, trying to come up with a cover story. Sam's still focused on Michael. "The bible's where, Mikey? Who took it?"

Michael wheezes and his hands spasm open-shut.

"Mikey!"

Jesse thinks that Westen is done for, but he rolls his head towards Sam. "black –" he pants, "black shoes." Hands spasm again, weaker this time. They lay half-open, clutching the pavement. "b-blank pants." The sirens get closer. "don't," Michael gasps, "know."

"Michael?" Fi's voice is wavering, the second time he's seen Fi anywhere close to tears. (Jesse'd made her cry, the first time.) Mike looks towards her, smiles, and faints. A line of cop cars whizz by, but one in the middle peals out towards them. The screech makes Jesse's teeth clench, and makes him absurdly grateful he'd left his semi-automatic weapon somewhere else.

Fiona grasps Michael's arm and starts wailing for the benefit of the cop (because when she really cries, it's silent). "Help us! You've got to help us, we were just going for some drinks when people started _shooting_ and they hit him and he _crashed_!" She dissolves into tears, and Jesse imagines what a sight they must be; Sam frantically trying to call Michael back, forearms stained with blood, Fiona wailing and cradling Michael's head, and Jesse seemingly shocked into apathy from horror.

Neither Sam nor Fiona give him a second look, because they trust him even after he shot Michael. They trust that he shot to save and not kill. Jesse's loyalty is re-established and any questions must come later, because right now there is an emergency. So Jesse plays his part, shedding his blank face for a dumbfounded, floundering one (because that's how he feels, because he still wonders whether he should have shot Michael to kill, because he doesn't know what to do now he's teamed up and been teamed up with the very people that burned him, because one of the heads of the Hydra is lying dead in a car not twenty feet away and who's going to take up his spot) that's easy to obtain.

The cop trusts them, and that's all they need because soon an ambulance is roaring up and Michael's in the hands of professionals (not their kind).

Jesse expects Sam to go in the back of the ambulance, but he and Fiona are standing off to the side and Fiona's face is hard as granite now. Whatever Michael did when Fiona was kidnapped, however hard he came down on Jesse and those that took her, it is nothing compared to Fiona's rage when the positions are reversed and Michael's the one in danger. She procures a handgun from somewhere (a habit Jesse's long since gotten used to) and cocks it.

"I'm going to have a little talk with _Vaughn_ about –"

Given the pure malice Fiona's embedded in the name (another name he doesn't know – how far had they kept Jesse out?), Jesse isn't about to object to anything she might say concerning this new person – but Sam cuts her off mid sentence. His voice is lower than normal, desperately trying for his normal cheer and falling short. "Hold on a second, Fi. Just where do you think Michael's going to end up?"

_In the hospital, of course, _thinks Jesse. But those words deflate Fiona. They exchange a look, and it all circles back to Jesse why he left this team:

"I am so fucking sick of all this 'hiding the truth from Jesse' bullshit."

Jesse kinda wishes Westen were here to shoot again, until Fiona looks at him with that wounded/guilty look. Piled on top of her worried/angry/scared/anxious/love/hate/whatever she has for Michael feelings, it's almost enough to make Jesse apologize. But she says something distracting and a lot more interesting.

"You're right. Sam, tell him everything."

And then she walks away unsteadily in three-inch heels, because when you're Fiona those are the kind of footwear you consider appropriate for pitched sniping against a war-for-profit billionaire's private bodyguard detachment. Sam looks after her, helplessly, before turning to their fourth sometimes-ally. It obvious he has no idea where to start, so Jesse decides to take it back to the beginning. "You can start by telling me how Michael got burned."

And Sam tells him the whole story.


End file.
